Rethink mandatory minimums for drug crimes

12:51 PM,
Aug. 21, 2013

Written by

USA TODAY

When crime shot up from the 1970s to the early 1990s and Americans demanded a response, among the tough new restrictions were mandatory minimum sentences to guarantee that criminals who got caught went away for a long time.

Making sure that murderers do more than a year or two in prison made perfect sense then and now, but time hasn't been as kind to the idea of harsh, inflexible sentences for lesser crimes, particularly the drug offenses that account for more than half the population in federal prisons, which are running about 40 percent over capacity. There's been a huge dollar cost to state and ...